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This paper reports the findings of the Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 17442 on performance modeling and prediction in the domains of Information Retrieval, Natural language Processing and Recommender Systems. We present a framework for further research, which identifies five major problem areas: understanding measures, performance analysis, making underlying assumptions explicit, identifying application features determining performance, and the development of prediction models describing the relationship between assumptions, features and resulting performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present in this manuscript a report on KidRec 2017 workshop, the first edition of the international workshop on Children & Recommender Systems, co-located with the 11th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys) held in Como, Italy. While research focused on recommender systems is prolific and addresses issues pertaining to multiple domains-from music, restaurant, and movie recommendations to scholarly publications or news-little has been done to explore the constraints and limitations that existing strategies must face when applied to non-traditional stakeholders, such as children. The first edition of our workshop was aimed at providing a venue dedicated to building community in this area and identify future research paths to nurture and grow this emerging community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The news industry has undergone a revolution in the past decade, with substantial changes continuing to this day. News consumption habits are changing due to the increase in the volume of news and the variety of sources. Readers need new mechanisms to cope with this vast volume of information in order to not only find a signal in the noise, but also to understand what is happening in the world given the multiple points of view describing events. These challenges in journalism relate to Information Retrieval (IR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) fields such as: verification of a source's reliability; the integration of news with other sources of information; real-time processing of both news content and social streams; de-duplication of stories; and entity detection and disambiguation. Although IR and NLP have been applied to news for decades, the changing nature of the space requires fresh approaches and a closer collaboration with our colleagues from the journalism environment. Following the success of the previous version of the workshop (NewsIR'16), the goal of this workshop, held in conjunction with ECIR 2018, is to continue to stimulate such discussion between the communities and to share interesting approaches to solve real user problems. A total number of 19 submissions were received and reviewed, of which 12 were accepted for presentation. In addition to that, we had over 30 registered participants in the workshop who were pleased to attend the two keynote talks given by well-known experts in the field - Edgar Meij (from industry) and Peter Tolmie (from academia) and oral and poster presentations from the accepted papers. The workshop also included a breakout session to discuss ideas for a future data challenge in news IR and closed with a focused panel discussion to reflect on the day. In summary, several ideas were presented in the workshop on solving complex information needs in the news domain. In addition, the workshop concluded with suggestions of important challenges and shared tasks to work on as a community for News IR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR) workshop series has started at ECIR in 2014 and serves as the annual gathering of IR researchers who address various information-related tasks on scientific corpora and bibliometrics. We welcome contributions elaborating on dedicated IR systems, as well as studies revealing original characteristics on how scientific knowledge is created, communicated, and used. This report presents all accepted papers at the 7th BIR workshop at ECIR 2018 in Grenoble, France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Workshop on Evaluation of Personalisation in Information Retrieval (WEPIR 2018) was held in conjunction with the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction & Retrieval (CHIIR 2018) in New Brunswick, USA. The purpose of WEPIR 2018 was to bring together researchers from different backgrounds, interested in advancing the evaluation of personalisation in information retrieval. The workshop focused on developing a common understanding of the challenges, requirements and practical limitations of evaluation of personalisation in information retrieval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a report on the NTCIR-13 conference held in December 2017, in Tokyo, Japan. NTCIR is a series of parallel and collective evaluation efforts designed to enhance research on diverse information access technologies, including, but not limited to, cross-language and multimedia information access, question-answering, text mining and summarization, with an emphasis on East Asian languages such as Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, as well as English. 105 different research groups from 20 countries/regions participated in one or more of the nine different tasks in NTCIR-13, to compete and collaborate on a common ground and thereby advance the state of the art. This report introduces the highlights of the conference, describes the scope and task designs of nine tasks organized at NTCIR-13, and provides a brief introduction to NTCIR-14, which started from January 2018 and will be closed in June 2019, which will be the 20th anniversary since the first NTCIR Conference in the summer of 1999. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the Strategic Workshop in Information Retrieval in Lorne is to explore the long-range issues of the Information Retrieval field, to recognize challenges that are on - or even over - the horizon, to build consensus on some of the key challenges, and to disseminate the resulting information to the research community. The intent is that this description of open problems will help to inspire researchers and graduate students to address the questions, and will provide funding agencies data to focus and coordinate support for information retrieval research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, there has been a growing number of questions about the relationship between preprints and double-blind peer-review at the SIGIR conference. These questions come from authors who wish to post papers which are under review to preprint servers such as arXiv.org, as well as reviewers who become aware of author identities through such postings, and are subsequently, unsure of how to proceed in a double-blind review process. A review of current conference publication guidelines was conducted, along with a survey of SIGIR community members to gain insight about their behaviors, practices and opinions. The paper presents results of this survey, as well as recommendations about submission and review policies for the SIGIR conference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the August 13, 2017 meeting of the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) of the organization Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in Tokyo, Japan. Topics include a session on women in information retrieval, a video presentation by graduate student Maram Hasanain, and comments by graduate student Maria Maistro.

The news industry has gone through seismic shifts in the past decade with digital content and social media completely redefining how people consume news. Readers check for accurate fresh news from multiple sources throughout the day using dedicated apps or social media on their smartphones and tablets. At the same time, news publishers rely more and more on social networks and citizen journalism as a frontline to breaking news. In this new era of fast- flowing instant news delivery and consumption, publishers and aggregators have to overcome a great number of challenges. These include the verification or assessment of a source's reliability; the integration of news with other sources of information; real-time processing of both news content and social streams in multiple languages, in different formats and in high volumes; deduplication; entity detection and disambiguation; automatic summarization; and news recommendation. Although Information Retrieval (IR) applied to news has been a popular research area for decades, fresh approaches are needed due to the changing type and volume of media content available and the way people consume this content. Hence, the first international workshop on recent trends in News Information Retrieval (NewsIR) was held in conjunction with ECIR 2016. As part of the workshop, we released a new dataset consisting of one million news articles to the research community. The workshop was very well attended with around 70 registered participants. We received a healthy number of 19 submissions in total of which 12 were accepted for presentation. In addition to that, we were pleased to have two keynote talks by well-known experts in the field -- on with an industry background (Jochen Leidner) and one from academia (Julio Gonzalo). The workshop also included a breakout session to discuss ideas for a future data challenge in news IR and closed with a focused panel discussion to reflect on the day. Throughout the day the workshop stimulated discussions around new and powerful uses of IR applied to news sources and the intersection of multiple IR tasks to solve real user problems. In particular, several ideas were presented on solving complex information needs for media monitoring, event detection and summarisation. Moreover, and going forward, the workshop concluded with a long list of suggestions for shared tasks, and dataset requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Dagstuhl Seminar on "Reproducibility of Data-Oriented Experiments in e-Science", held on 24-29 January 2016, focused on the core issues and approaches to reproducibility of experiments from a multidisciplinary point of view, sharing the experience coming from several fields of computer science. In this paper, we discuss, summarize, and adapt the main findings of the seminar to the context of IR evaluation -- both system-oriented and user-oriented -- in order to raise awareness in our community and stimulate the fields towards and increased reproducibility of our experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The amount of structured content published on the Web has been growing rapidly, making it possible to address increasingly complex information access tasks. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of large scale human-curated knowledge bases as well as a growing array of techniques that identify or extract information automatically from unstructured and semi-structured sources. The ESAIR workshop series aims to advance the general research agenda on the problem of creating and exploiting semantic annotations. The eighth edition of ESAIR took place at CIKM 2015 in Melbourne, Australia, on the 23rd of October. Having a special focus on applications, we dedicated an "annotations in action" track to demonstrations that showcase innovative prototype systems, in addition to the regular research and position paper contributions. The workshop also featured invited talks from leaders in the field. This report presents an overview of the event and its major outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 38th European Conference on Information Retrieval took place from the 20th to the 23rd of March 2016 in Padua, Italy. This report summarizes the conference in terms of the presented keynotes, scientific and social programme, industry day, tutorials, workshops and student support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1st International Workshop on Narrative Extraction from Texts (Text2Story 2018) was held in conjunction with the 40th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2018, Grenoble on the 26 th March 2018. The workshop aimed to help foster the collaboration of researchers on a wide range of multidisciplinary issues related to the text-to-narrativestructure. The program consisted of two keynote talks, six research presentations, a poster session and a slot for demo presentations. This report briefly summarizes the workshop. More information about the workshop is available at http://text2story18.inesctec.pt [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2nd Workshop on Social Aspects in Personalization And Search was held on March 26, 2018 in conjuction with the 40th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2018). The scientific program included paper presentations and a final discussion. The keynotes were delivered by Dr. Sihem Amer-Yahia and Dr. Denis Parra. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The SIGIR 2015 Workshop on Reproducibility, Inexplicability, and Generalizability of Results (RIGOR) took place on Thursday, August 13, 2015 in Santiago, Chile. The goal of the workshop was two fold. The first to provide a venue for the publication and presentation of negative results. The second was to provide a venue through which the authors of open source search engines could compare performance of indexing and searching on the same collections and on the same machines -- encouraging the sharing of ideas and discoveries in a like-to-like environment. In total three papers were presented and seven systems participated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a report from the Workshop on Social and Collaborative Information Seeking (SCIS), held on May 14-15, 2015 at Rutgers University. Twenty-eight participants contributed to the workshop in the form of short talks and work sessions. Outcomes from the workshop include a "research roadmap" of important future research needed in the area of social and collaborative search. The report presented here summarizes the short talks and the discussions that took place in six breakout groups. The report ends with pointers for future directions (research roadmap) and a few take-away points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the Privacy-Preserving IR workshop, a SIGIR 2015 Workshop, which was aimed to discuss research fields of IR and privacy/security, and mitigate privacy threats in information retrieval. Li Xiong, head of the Assured Information Management and Sharing (AIMS) research group at Emory University, gave a keynote presentation entitled "Making Private User Data Accessible for Information Retrieval Research: Data Sharing with Differential Privacy."

This article reports on the CBRecSys 2015 workshop, the second edition of the workshop on new trends in content-based recommender systems, co-located with RecSys 2015 in Vienna, Austria. Content-based recommendation has been applied successfully in many different domains, but it has not seen the same level of attention as collaborative filtering techniques have. Nevertheless, there are many recommendation domains and applications where content and metadata play a key role, either in addition to or instead of ratings and implicit usage data. The CBRecSys workshop series provides a dedicated venue for work dedicated to all aspects of content-based recommender systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 37th European Conference on Information Retrieval took place from the 29th of March to the 2nd of April 2015 in Vienna, Austria. This report summarises the conference in terms of the keynotes presented, programme, industry day, tutorials, workshops and student support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first international workshop on Neuro-Physiological (NP) Methods in Information Retrieval Research took place at SIGIR 2015 in Santiago, Chile on August 13, 2015. The workshop included a mixture of short introductions to selected NP methods, paper presentations and a panel discussion by invited scholars. Each session included significant time allotted to open discussions among the participants. The high attendance and the lively discussions demonstrated significant interest in the use of NP methods in information retrieval research. The panel and discussions pointed out many advantages of using these methods as a data source complementary to traditional measures but also potentially offering deeper insights into humans interacting with information. Significant challenges, such as the lack of baseline data and reference tasks, and a need to collaborate with neuroscientists, were also noted. Overall, the NP-methods were found to be very promising and worth continued research efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the 9th Russian Summer School in Information Retrieval (RuSSIR 2015) which took place in St. Petersburg, Russia, on August 24-28, 2015. The National Research University Higher School of Economics and the Russian Information Retrieval Evaluation Seminar (ROMIP) co-organized the summer school which focused on social network analysis and graph mining along with traditional topics from Information Retrieval.

The second Asian Summer School in Information Access (ASSIA 2015) was held between 24th and 27th August, 2015 in Taipei City, Taiwan, R.O.C. The summer school offered 10 lectures in Information Retrieval, Social Media Search, and related topics, along with one panel discussion, a poster session, and a session from commercial sectors and young scholars. This reports a successful international summer school in Asia attracting a total of 45 participants from the range of countries in Asia and Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 10th European Summer School in Information Retrieval (ESSIR 2015) was held in Thessaloniki, Greece between August 31 and September 4, 2015. The summer school offered high quality lectures on 13 topics in Information Retrieval and related areas, a new edition of the Symposium on Future Directions in Information Access (FDIA), group activities, and a rich social programme. This report provides an overview of a successful international summer school that attracted a total of 51 participants from a wide range of countries in Europe and North America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a report on the sixth edition of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF 2015), held in early September 2015, in Toulouse, France. CLEF was a four day event combining a Conference and an Evaluation Forum. The focus of the Conference is "Experimental IR" as carried out in the CLEF Labs and other evaluation forums, it featured keynotes by Greg Greffenstette, Mounia Lalmas, and Doug Oard, and 43 papers have been presented, covering a wide range of topics. There were a total of eight Labs: eHealth, ImageCLEF, LifeCLEF, Living Labs for IR, NEWSREEL, PAN, QA, and Social Book Search, addressing a wide range of tasks, media, languages, and ways to go beyond standard test collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The second workshop on Gamification for Information Retrieval took place at ECIR 2015 in Vienna, Austria on the 29th of March. The workshop program included two invited keynote presentations, seven oral presentations of refereed papers, lots of mini discussion sessions and a fishbowl session. The presentations covered diverse topics from playing around with an eye tracker to a game with IR papers and even a game of scientific hangman, generating lively and fun discussions. The workshop was a crowdpinion experiment itself, gathering participants' momentary opinions via an Android app. One of the main themes of the day was the interplay of gamification aspects and incentives, where the key challenge is to align player motivations with the goal of the task. Any misalignment may lead to gamification as a tool being more damaging than useful with users' focus shifting from [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On July 11th 2014 the First Workshop on the Gathering Efficient Assessments of Relevance (GEAR 2014) was held as part of the SIGIR 2014 conference at the Gold Coast, Australia. An invited talk was given by Dr Nicola Ferro. Three full papers were presented, in addition to a design activity which lead to a lively discussion on gathering relevance assessments. This contribution discusses the events of the workshop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On July 11th, 2014 the First International Workshop on Privacy-Preserving IR: When Information Retrieval Meets Privacy and Security (PIR 2013) [1, 2] was held as part of the SIGIR 2014 conference in Gold Coast, Australia. Three invited keynotes were given by Prof. Douglas W. Oard, Prof. Christopher W. Clifton, and Prof. David D. Lewis. There were 6 full papers and 3 short papers presented in the presentation sessions. Finally, there were breakout discussions on determining the future directions of these interdisciplinary fields of IR and privacy/security for our community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The workshop on Medical Information Retrieval took place at SIGIR 2014 in Gold Coast, Australia on July 11. The workshop included eight oral presentations of referred papers and an invited keynote presentation. This allowed time for lively discussions among the participants. These showed the significant interest in the medical information retrieval domain and the many research challenges arising in this space which need to be addressed to give added value to the wide variety of users that can profit from medical information search, such as patients, general health professionals and specialist groups such as radiologists who mainly search for images and image related information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we overview the 2014 Entity Recognition and Disambiguation Challenge (ERD'14), which took place from March to June 2014 and was summarized in a dedicated workshop at SIGIR 2014. The main goal of the ERD challenge was to promote research in recognition and disambiguation of entities in unstructured text. Unlike many past entity linking challenges, no mention segmentations were given to the participating systems for a given document. Participants were asked to implement a web service for their system to minimize human involvement during evaluation and to enable measuring the processing times. The challenge has attracted a lot of interest (over 100 teams registered, and 27 of those submitted final results). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) to be hosted by the University of Sheffield's Information School in Sheffield, England on September 15-18, 2014.

The article offers information on the Evaluation Methodologies in Information Retrieval Seminar1 which was held in Saarland, Germany from October 27 to November 1, 2013. Diane Kelly discussed problematic issues related to methodology used for information retrieval (IR) evaluation. A working group decided to prepare a book on best practices in IR evaluation.

Evaluation is a central aspect of information retrieval (IR) research. In the past few years, a new evaluation methodology known as living labs has been proposed as a way for researchers to be able to perform in-situ evaluation. The first CIKM workshop on Living Labs for IR evaluation (LL'13) was held on 1st November 2013 in San Francisco, USA. The workshop consisted of an industrial keynote, four oral paper presentations, three demo presentations, and a discussion session. This report presents an overview of the scope and contents of the workshop and outlines the major outcomes [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the highlights of the 1st Scottish Information Retrieval Workshop that was held in May 2013 in Glasgow, Scotland. These include a keynote on the problems, opportunities and challenges of finding strategic information within enterprise delivered by Arjen de Vries, a study of information management in the patient surgical pathway in National Health Service (NHS) Scotland presented by Doctor Matt-Mouley Bouamrane and a talk on local event retrieval with social sensors.

This workshop gathered leading researchers in information retrieval, human-computer interaction and information behavior to discuss challenges and opportunities associated with the development of systems and tools to support people involved with complex, multi-search and multi-session search tasks. Such task-based search systems present many challenges and the goal of this workshop was to enumerate, discuss, and document these challenges into a research agenda to guide future research. This article includes a description of the motivations and goals of the workshop and syntheses of major workshop activities including pre- workshop identification of challenges by each participant and discussion breakout groups. Major themes of the workshop included the development of domain-neutral modeling techniques to represent tasks, task properties and task-related search behaviors, interface support tools to assist with a variety of task-related information behaviors and the identification of techniques and tools to evaluate task-based search systems. The most critical need identified was the development of task models; this was viewed as essential for addressing the challenges of tools and evaluation measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The SIGIR 2013 Workshop on Modeling User Behavior of Information Retrieval Evaluation brought together researchers interested in improving Cranfield-style evaluation of information retrieval through the modeling of user behavior. The workshop included two invited talks, ten short paper presentations, and breakout groups. Workshop participants brainstormed research questions of interest and formed breakout groups to explore these questions in greater depth. In addition to summarizing the invited talks and presentations, this report details the results of the breakout groups, which provide a set of research directions for the improvement of information retrieval evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the highlights of the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) that was held on March 24-27, 2013 in Moscow, Russia. These include the opening keynote on social media information given by Mor Naaman, the talk on Contours and Convergence: Past, Present and Future of (Interactive) IR Research Practices given by Diane Kelly, and the presentation of the best paper award.

The second workshop of ENWI was held in Malmö, Sweden, June 12-13, 2013. ENWI is the European Network for Work Information which intends to establish a group of researchers who share a common interest in the study of workplace information practices. The better understanding of people and their tasks, and how information is part of their work is a primary goal of ENWI. Furthermore, the design and study of better technology tools supporting information practices and knowledge work is also in the focus of the network. The second workshop strengthened the network by identifying common terminology research issues and joint projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On August 1st, 2013 the First Workshop on the Exploration, Navigation and Retrieval of Information in Cultural Heritage (ENRICH 2013) was held as part of the SIGIR 2013 conference in Dublin, Ireland. An invited talk was given by Prof. Jaap Kamps. There were 3 full papers and 3 short papers presented in addition to a poster and demonstration session. Finally, there was a lively discussion on determining the research roadmap for this specialist area of IR research. This contribution discusses the events of the workshop and outlines future directions for the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the 3rd European Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval co-located with the 36th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, held in Dublin, Ireland, August 1, 2013. The workshop gathered 32 participants with 6 papers for oral presentations and 8 short papers with poster presentations covering a good range of topics and research questions in the intersection of HCI and IR. Group exercises in connection to the oral presentations resulted in a set of important aspects to be considered in future research in HCI and IR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We summarize the 2013 Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval. The two-day symposium was held October 3-4 in Vancouver, BC. The event brought together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry for in-depth discussions in an informal setting. We accepted rigorously peer-reviewed full papers that will be archived and published in the ACM Digital Library, as well as short papers describing work in progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Seventeenth Australian Document Computing Symposium was held in Dunedin, New Zealand on the 5th and 6th of December 2012. In total twenty four papers were submitted. From those eleven were accepted for full presentation and 8 for short presentation. A poster session was held jointly with the Australasian Language Technology Workshop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the winter school titled "Bridging Between Information Retrieval and Databases," a week long event in Bressanone, Italy on February 4-8, 2013 organized by the PROMIS ER FP7 network of excellence. The winter school aims to educate participants about the core topics that constitute the multidisciplinary area of information access and retrieval to unstructured, semi-structured , and structured information. Seventeen lectures will be presented at the event.

There is an increasing amount of structure on the web as a result of modern web languages, user tagging and annotation, emerging robust NLP tools, and an ever growing volume of linked data. These meaningful, semantic, annotations hold the promise to significantly enhance information access, by enhancing the depth of analysis of today's systems. Currently, we have only started exploring the possibilities and only begin to understand how these valuable semantic cues can be put to fruitful use. To complicate matters, standard text search excels at shallow information needs expressed by short keyword queries, and here semantic annotation contributes very little, if anything. The main questions for the workshop are how to leverage the rich context currently available, especially in a mobile search scenario, giving powerful new handles to exploit semantic annotations. And how can we fruitfully combine information retrieval and knowledge intensive approaches, and for the first time work actively toward a unified view on exploiting semantic annotations. There was a strong feeling that we made substantial progress. Specifically, each of the breakout groups contributed to our understanding of the way forward. First, there is a need for further integration of symbolic and statistical methods with each adopting parts of the other's strengths, by focusing on types of annotations that are informed by and meaningful for the task at hand, and relying on automatic information extraction and annotation based on web scale observations. Second, the discussion contributed to the creation of a concrete shared corpus with state of the art semantic annotation--in particular a web crawl annotated with Freebase concepts--that will benefit research in this area for years to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Workshop on Search and Exploration of X-Rated Information (SEXI) was presented for the first time at the Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) 2013 in Rome, Italy. It represents a first attempt to study adult content from the perspective of the research communities in Web Search and Data Mining. To this end, five short papers were presented covering different research questions in searching and evaluating adult content on the Web, with two invited talks from experts in adult content from the fields of evolutionary psychology and media studies. The day ended with a panel that included the two invited speakers, and an expert in human trafficking on the Web. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]